With the rapid development of information technology and highly popularized applications of computers, portable and miniature electronic instruments have been extensively used in daily life. In pursuit of facility and practicality, the tendency of current portable electronic products is toward light, thin, small-footprint designs to meet market expectations. For example, a notebook computer is portable and highly capable of processing large quantities of digital data; thus, the notebook computer is popular and used widely.
With the great advancement of integrated circuit processes and the increasingly rising demand for higher integrated circuit capacities, the designs of current integrated circuits are very delicate and complex. Both users and software applications place great demands on central processing units (CPU), thereby necessitating powerful but complex circuit layouts. Although these central processing units provide many powerful functions, the complicated circuit design causes a great consumption of electrical energy. This energy consumption results in raising the chip temperature, and in turn degrades performance and may cause permanent chip damage. This problem is especially serious in portable electronic devices.
In general, rapid heat dissipation is very important for electronic devices, especially for computers, to achieve optimum efficiency. When heat cannot be dissipated instantly but instead accumulates within an electronic device, the device cannot function properly; and if, for example a CPU does not function properly, the whole computer is accordingly degraded and may even become irreparably damaged.
Fans are used extensively in many electronic products to dissipate heat such that the products function optimally and are protected from permanent damage. When the temperature of a system is excessive, a fan speeds up to lower the temperature of the whole system; when the temperature of the system has been lowered to a set value, the fan speed then returns to the original rate. Typically, a fan module in an electronic product is connected with an outer environment, so as to dissipate heat to the outer environment.